Gadgetory

so today I'm going to be having a quick look at a gigabyte geforce 210 512 Meg video card there's one thing that gigabyte really wants you to know about this particular card and it is that it supports HDMI they have a gold-plated HDMI connector on this particular card you can see that the whole back is pretty much about how it has a golden plated HDMI connector so there's your little connector it says golden plated then there's your supports Full HD resolution this is a hole but all of this stuff is all about HDMI and how this is gold-plated then you've got main features down here and called tiny text something about geforce 210 supports PCI Express 2.0 shader model 4.0 etc etc this is a DirectX 10 card so why don't we go ahead and get this open the DirectX 10 functionality is not particularly important for a card like this this is not really a gaming card it is far more valid or invalid it's far more relevant as a more like a media card so if you were building a media center and you wanted some kind of dedicated GPU if you want to offload some of the processing for HD video off to the GPU this would be a perfect fit so you can see it comes with a low profile bracket which is labeled DVI and HDMI there it is comes with a driver disk so don't use that download the latest Nvidia comm then it comes with a user's manual okay so the user's manual shows you the board layout it shows you okay so we'll we'll see this in a minute but it looks like it has a VGA connector as well which you can actually remove if you're using it in a low profile case shows you how to connect HDMI and install the software a bunch of different languages thank you so much and then in here on a little piece of foam in an anti-static bag you have the geforce 210 512 Meg video card so if I could just get this Wow look how long this piece of tape is okay here we go it came off excellent so the layout of the card is fairly straightforward you've got your standard heatsink which is actually pretty nice this is an aluminum heatsink you can tell from how light the card is overall has a little tiny fan this I'm not too happy to see but my suspicion is that with a low power draw low heat output GPU like this even if the fans not spinning very fast you're going to get enough cooling in order for it to function Perley so I suspect this doesn't need to spin very fast because when these little fans ramp up man are they annoying so it connects via a normal three pin header to the video card itself there's not a whole lot in terms of components on this card so you can see it does use a standard PCI Express 16x connection at the back you do not find any additional power needed for this particular video card on the back of the card you can see we've got a couple of RAM chips and then a couple of clips right here for how the front cooler fastens okay then on the back we will find all of the connectivity from the VGA connection to the DVI connection to the much touted gold-plated HDMI connection and so you can see that while the other two are actually nickel-plated okay so you can see this is nickel-plated the HDMI connector is gold-plated now they'll tell you a whole bunch of marketing spiel about how this means a better support for HD resolutions or or whatever else but the reality of it is that gold-plated doesn't actually mean that you have particularly better signal transmission but what it does mean is that the connector is far more durable so if you were to unplug or plug back in or if the cable gets wiggled Gold is a soft and malleable metal and so even though it's not the best conductor out there it connects enough and because it's so soft it ensures that you always have a good connection so you're not going to actually lose contact between your cable and your connector if they're both gold-plated it's very unlikely so that is why a gold-plated connector is actually important